I really enjoyed Monty Don's recent BBC television series on Italian gardens, but if he wants inspiration for a follow-up, I'd like to suggest that he looks at Islamic gardens. Any garden historian will tell you what a huge debt we in the West owe to the Muslim ideal of paradise.
This is encapsulated in the design of the Persian chahar bagh. This enclosed garden has a central fountain which flows into four water rills, which represent the four rivers of Paradise. Famous examples include the Garden of Fin in Iran, the Taj Mahal garden in India, and the Court of the Lions in the Alhambra, Granada - which brought the concept of the paradise garden to the West in the Middle Ages. Even today, many of us in Britain see the walled garden, with its connotations of shelter and repose, filled with scented flowers, delicious fruit and soothing fountains, as the ideal.
In his book, Gardens, An Essay on the Human Condition, the American academic Robert Pogue Harrison argues that it also provides a key to understanding Islam in the modern world. “It is difficult for us in the West,” he says, “to understand how the religion in whose name so much violence is unleashed ... can have peace as its highest ideal. Even more challenging is to fathom how the demand for peacefulness in Islam might be behind the great upheavals. One day we will realise that it is not so much our modern Western values but rather the unconstrained frenzy of the West that offends the very core of Islam in the eyes of the extremists. Where paradise is imagined as a garden of perfect tranquillity, our incurable Western agitation takes on a diabolical quality.”
To find world peace and understanding through gardening - now that really would be something. -
The Independent